Why Do Paint Brands Choose a Color of the Year? Behr and Home Depot CMOs Reveal the Strategy

Several years ago, Better Homes & Gardens surveyed homeowners to see how they felt about painting their walls. The upshot: many are too scared to do it. It’s not that Americans are afraid of color per se—they’re just wary of choosing the wrong one. Nearly a quarter of respondents admitted that they had no skill for picking hues at all, and 40% reported they were anxious that, whatever color they opted for, they’d soon get sick of it. According to the Home Improvement Research Institute, interior paint is a $15 billion industry in this country. But reservations about choosing colors—aversion to making purchasing decision is what psychologists call “status quo bias”—have long been a stumbling block for paint brands. This sounds like a job for the marketing department, doesn’t it? Over the years, paint companies have developed a singular method to help consumers get past their pigment jitters, and it’s one that Behr—the house brand for Home Depot—deployed earlier this week when it announced its choice for 2024’s color of the year. (It’s called Cracked Pepper, but more on that later.) In anointing a color—and putting the authoritative weight of the Behr and Home Depot names behind it—this initiative furnishes reluctant shoppers with the missing emotion they need to make a purchase: confidence. “It gives them permission,” Behr CMO Jodi Allen told Adweek. “It helps with that narrowing [of choices] and it helps them with validation.” Go ahead, buy it Behr is tapping into a strategy that marketers in other segments have used for decades. In instances where shoppers feel a measure of insecurity over discretionary purchases, brands have stepped forward to give them the approval they need. Consider: In 1971, McDonald’s spurred Americans to indulge in a burger and fries with the jingle “You deserve a break today.” A few years later, General Motors goaded men to spring for a new Camaro with ads that cooed: “You deserve a car this good.” Most famous of all was L’Oreal’s “You’re worth it” campaign, which gave women its blessing to spend liberally on cosmetics. Sure, said the ads, the brand might cost a little more, but “you’re worth it.” (Not only did this campaign appear in 40 languages over the course of 50 years, L’Oreal has since broadened it to “We’re all worth it” to include men.) Behr is also not the first brand to use the color of the year idea. Color-matching authority Pantone has announced a color of the year since 2000, putting its "finger on the pulse of what we call the zeitgeist" to choose it, executive director Leatrice Eiseman told Adweek last year. It's hard to find a paint company that hasn’t followed suit. Sherwin Williams, Dunn-Edwards, Benjamin Moore, Graham & Brown, Glidden/PPG, Valspar, Krylon and Dutch Boy—all of them, come the late summer, announce their own picks for the coming year’s official color. For its part, Minwax even announces a wood stain of the year. These selections usually come equipped with the sort of atmospheric verbiage one might expect from a carefully assembled marketing effort. Dutch Boy’s Ironside, for example, is a “deep, comforting green” that’s “a richly dimensional hue that soothes and reassures.” Raspberry Blush, Benjamin Moore’s official color for 2023, "celebrates the positivity and enjoyment of life that both color and music can influence." Which brings us to Behr’s 2024 selection, Cracked Pepper. In truth, the color is just a grayish black, though the brand prefers to term it “a timeless and modern hue that awakens the senses and exudes confidence on every scale.” Behr’s description reads as credible, however, because consumers regard the brand as coming from what Allen calls a “color leadership position” based on both its 76 years in business and its 45-year association with Home Depot. The youngsters need guidance Credentials like these can matter especially in the minds of younger shoppers—millennials and Gen Zers who’ve managed to swing the purchase of their first homes. “Millennials and Gen Z are excited to start projects, but they’re new homeowners,” Home Depot CMO Molly Battin said. “Painting your house is one of the first projects [they] take on, but what we see is they’re a bit stuck and it’s a bit overwhelming.” Independent research backs up Battin’s observations. A 2017 Harris poll revealed that 52% of millennials wanted professional help in choosing paint colors for their dwellings. Here is where a retail store having an exclusive partner in paint works out to be mutually beneficial. Behr and Home Depot enjoy authoritative reputations on their own, but combined the effect is stronger still. When both brands pool their expertise to recommend a color, Battin said, “It gives [consumers] the confidence to know that if [they] take on a project, it’s going to look beautiful, it’s going to look on-trend, it’s going to look modern.” Behr’s color selection additionally benefits Home Depot because at least half of the hues it chooses qualify as neutrals. Since Home Depot also sells chairs, furniture, light fixtures and rugs, a color that works well with a variety of items theoretically encourages shoppers to purchase some of those items. “We want to make sure the color of the year is very usable,” Allen said, so that “a variety of décor items” will work with it. A homeowner who paints with Cracked Pepper might also enjoy one perk that Behr doesn’t mention. Should they choose to sell and trade up, it might be a good idea to leave that hue on the walls for the open house. Earlier this year, Zillow conducted a paint color analysis and found that buyers will pay an average of $2,512 more for a house with charcoal gray on the walls.